Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Counting down to go

I've been remiss in keeping up with this blog lately, which is generally a good thing. It means I'm too busy for navel gazing.

Since my last update I've put together one of the best two months of training and racing I can ever remember as I aim this building tsunami of racing fitness (by my standards) at October 17th and the Baystate Marathon. In general, a marathon is always the end of a racing season for me--I'm not one of those freaks who can run several marathons off of a single block of training and I have neither the interest, nor the budget to do a succession of sub-maximal marathons in the interest of earning a t-shirt or entry into some club or what have you. With the exception of perhaps the 2008 Flying Monkey, which I ran 5 weeks after a PR effort at Baystate, every marathon I've run has been an all-in effort, which means I'm done for the season after that.

This time there is the added finality that a few hours after I finish Baystate and enjoy some food and post-race beers with friends, I will board a plane for Las Vegas and my company's world-wide sales kickoff that runs Sunday to Thursday. I'm not sure I'll even bring running shoes. Okay who am I kidding, yeah I will.

This fact has been quite liberating. In running terms, I'm not at all looking beyond a week from Sunday. That's the end of the earth for me. At some point after Vegas I'll hit the reset button and put some new goals on the calendar and begin the process of starting over, but we'll jump of that bridge when we come to it. I'm living in the now.

Here's what I've done since my last update:

Week of 8/9 -- 74 miles including 2 decent workouts

Week of 8/16 -- 78 miles indcluding Saunders 10k in 36:37 (14th) and a 20+ mile long run

Week of 8/23 -- 80 miles including 1 good track workout and a 20+ miler on the Baystate course with Mark and Dan

Week of 8/30 -- 73 miles with one decent workout and no long run with Cape Ann on Monday

Week of 9/27 -- 66 miles including an unplanned day off (sick) and yet a really good 18 miler with 6 miles at sub MP on Sunday.

The only one of those weeks I can find any fault with is last week, where I was dealing with a bad cold and took a day off. Even then Sunday's workout went so well I didn't even worry about the lower mileage. They hay's in the barn.

This weekend I'll get a little greedy and see if I can squeeze a 5k PR out of this cycle before I spend everything I've got left on Baystate. The old 5k / 42k double. It's worth a try--you gotta get while the gettin's good.